The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,22

waning light. She bobbed, and she liked the rhythm of the subtle movement. She was, for the first time in many years, weightless.

Breaking through to the surface was not as new a feeling as she had expected it to be. Yetu had lived it all before through the rememberings, and though her mind struggled to focus on any particular image or memory, it was familiar. This was how her people must have felt after the Remembrance. The raw pain of the memories was gone, but the truth of it still remained in the wajinru, helping them to carry on.

That was how it had been before, at least. Now, her people were still remembering. It would take them some time to untangle themselves from it.

Yetu focused on making sense of her surroundings. There was nothing solid that she could see. No land. No boats. No birds. Just water and sky.

Soaking up the strange nothingness of life without the History, she drifted off to sleep. She awoke at random intervals, stoked to consciousness by the searing pain all over. When she tried to convince herself that she should go hunting for meat, she passed out again from fatigue and pain. This carried on for three days, her mind and body both at the brink.

Any attempts at wakefulness were quickly met with protest by her sore limbs. There was an ache, a throbbing, a pull, a tension in every part of her. She let herself be moved about the sea. Storms shook her, tossed her body like a piece of driftwood here and there. They lifted her, then thrust her back down.

Though pain racked over every inch of her, this was a deep, restful sleep. There were no nightmares. Rememberings didn’t haunt her. She was just Yetu. She wasn’t quite sure who that was, but she didn’t mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.

When she finally awoke properly, it was onshore. And she wasn’t alone.

* * *

The two-legs spoke a short distance away using a language Yetu couldn’t name, but that she knew. She may have forgotten the specifics of her own life and of the rememberings she’d once carried, but in the same way she still knew how to speak wajinru, she knew many other languages too.

The surface dwellers were talking about her, asking what she was, wondering among themselves if they’d ever seen such a thing. One said that it didn’t matter and argued that Yetu looked more or less like food, and that they should eat her.

Yetu groaned as she squinted her eyes open cautiously. The light was so unbearable, and pathetically, she felt homesick already, coveting the deep sea, its blanket of cold and dark.

One of the two-legs in the distance noted that Yetu was moving, breathing. She’d washed into a small pool bordered by massive rocks, the top half of her body in air, the bottom in a mix of gushy sand that her torso seemed to sink into. The water was extremely shallow, but the tide brushed over her, back and forth, allowing her to breathe through her gills.

Strangely, she was breathing with her mouth and nose, too, sucking in air from her surroundings with the two narrow slits in her face and her wide mouth. She didn’t know she could do that. It was a new, uncomfortable feeling, and her lungs felt unsatisfied.

Her body had never hurt this much before. The waves must have battered her against the rocks before tossing her into this hole. All her cartilage was damaged.

One of the two-legs started to approach, and Yetu tried to move back into the water, but she was so stiff, so spent, and she certainly couldn’t clear the large boulders separating her from the larger sea. She settled for a scream, opening her mouth wide, showing rows of sharp, long teeth, narrow and overlapping.

Her eyes and nose disappeared as her mouth expanded, her face replaced with a black, endless pit guarded by fangs. The two-legs jumped back, then stepped away farther and farther with cautious steps, hands held out in front of them.

She didn’t quiet herself until they were a safe distance away, her teeth at the ready. She roared, the ensuing sound so different on land than it was in the water. She was pleased to find it sounded even more terrifying. She didn’t want them to think they could hurt her just because she was in a vulnerable state. She would not let them forget she